Bruce Alexander’s Globalization of Addiction Website

Unknown-1This website is well worth checking out. I really like Bruce Alexander’s ideas. They need reflecting upon.

‘Global society is drowning in addiction to drug use and a thousand other habits. This is because people around the world, rich and poor alike, are being torn from the close ties to family, culture, and traditional spirituality that constituted the normal fabric of life in pre-modern times. This kind of global society subjects people to unrelenting pressures towards individualism and competition, dislocating them from social life.

People adapt to this dislocation by concocting the best substitutes that they can for a sustaining social, cultural and spiritual wholeness, and addiction provides this substitute for more and more of us.

History shows that addiction can be rare in a society for many centuries, but can become nearly universal when circumstances change – for example, when a cohesive tribal culture is crushed or an advanced civilisation collapses.

Of course, this historical perspective does not deny that differences in vulnerability are built into each individual’s genes, individual experience, and personal character, but it removes individual differences from the foreground of attention, because societal determinants are so much more powerful. Addiction is much more a social problem than an individual disorder.

This site is about the relationship between addiction on the one hand, and global economic and political realities on the other. Documents, videos, audio recordings, and links may be submitted by anyone using the “contact” feature, and will be added to the site if they are relevant and carefully edited. This site was initially based on the work of Bruce K. Alexander, Ph.D., who is the site administrator.’